Hi all
I’m considering buying a used Live Plus for the Netflix capability and am asking Live Plus owners what your experience is with the Netflix app. In the rural community I live in, our DSL speed is very choppy, so even though my line connection has been tested to be good up over 4Mb/s, our service rarely stays over 1Mb/s on the average. I have one of those Network Blu-ray players, an LG-BP200, and it seems to handle this well, spooling up about 30sec to start and I suspect alot more once the movie is playing. On particularly bad days, I can tell the line quality as the player down-rezzes the picture during instances when the line rate dips badly, maintaining a watchable frame rate and sound.
So my relatively cheap Blu-ray player achieves impressive performance for crappy line rate conditions, and I would hope that the WD Live Plus can deliver similar or better performance (perhaps a larger playback spool that makes good use of all that RAM). Any of your Live Plus owners out there able to comment on this? I’m sure I’m not the only user here with choppy DSL service, and I want to know whether the Plus will deliver watchable Netflix playback under these conditions, or should I just buy another Network Blu-ray unit? I like the WD Live, having two units that serve me well for all my LAN media, and the Plus would be a great addition since my Blu-Ray player does not suport LAN media playback.
Well Netflix will work the same as your BD player at best, I don’t think there will be any difference.
The only problem I have with Netflix and the WDTV Live Streaming player is the sound issues.
Apparently, the problem is with the all-in-one HDTV out. If you connect the audio up to the component out, you won’t have the problem.
I haven’t done this yet because I don’t think the TV will go for HDMI picture and component sound, so then I’d have to go with component video out as well.
They are supposed to be working on the problem, but the solution for me has been to completely reset the WDTV, either by going into the setup menu and selecting reset, or pulling the plug.
Thanks for the tip TRA; I’ll keep that in mind if I don’t find a Live Plus and get a Live Streaming instead. I don’t know if the Plus has the same problem but I’ve never had audio problems over HDMI from either of my two Lives, and the Plus is very similar internally and firmware wise.
I’m hoping that out of the many Live Plus owners on this forum, I can at least get some idea how well Netflix works when the network service is choppy. My two Lives freeze in YouTube (legacy version) and Flingo very infrequently on a momentary network loss, requiring a full power unplug to recover them. That’s tolerable for 3minute videos, but I’d consider it a major flaw if it were to also happen in the Netflix app. Both my units are running 1.05.04V, and I’d expect to run a Plus at the same firmware rev.
